TRIGGERnometry - Triggernometry - Ep. 5 David Pilling

00:00:00.000 okay hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this

00:00:15.640 is a show for you if you are bored of people on the internet arguing about subjects they know

00:00:20.520 nothing about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts here the

00:00:26.100 The world-famous Angel Comedy Club, our amazing expert guest this week,

00:00:29.960 is the Africa editor of the Financial Times here in London

00:00:32.600 and the author of The Growth Delusion.

00:00:35.080 David Pilling, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:36.880 Thanks very much. I'm slightly nervous.

00:00:38.780 Let's see what happens.

00:00:40.660 Well, this is what we like to engender in our guests.

00:00:43.780 Good, it's worked.

00:00:44.700 Yeah.

00:00:45.300 It is a bit of a weird studio we have here.

00:00:47.240 It's like a black curtain and pretty much nothing else.

00:00:50.000 It could be an ISIS video.

00:00:51.680 That's pretty much where we are.

00:00:53.640 So, David, welcome to the show.

00:00:55.640 thank you very much for coming on. We really look forward to speaking to you about your book,

00:00:58.980 The Growth Illusion. But before we do that, tell us a little bit about how you are where you are

00:01:03.360 and how maybe you formed the opinions that you have now. How has that happened?

00:01:06.280 Sure. Okay. I mean, look, I've been a journalist at the Financial Times for

00:01:09.320 longer than I'd care to mention, but, you know, 25 years, let's say. Throughout that time,

00:01:14.200 I've been posted abroad. I was posted in Latin America. I was in Japan. Then I covered all of

00:01:19.480 Asia. Now I cover Africa and I've covered many other things in between. And one of the things

00:01:24.740 that struck me or crept up on me is that we use this term GDP, gross domestic product,

00:01:30.040 which really is synonymous with the economy. When we talk about the economy or when we talk about

00:01:34.380 growth, that is what we're talking about, GDP. And as a journalist working for the Financial

00:01:38.920 Times, a very serious, and I think actually an excellent newspaper, but one becomes used to

00:01:44.260 using that as a kind of a metric. And you measure things against it, tax to GDP, debt to GDP,

00:01:49.660 you know and this economy is growing by three percent so it must be better than this one that's

00:01:54.640 only growing at two and not nearly as good as that one that's growing at ten but it's it began

00:01:58.780 to creep up on me well what does this number really mean what's in it and when i turned to

00:02:03.740 japan i moved to japan in 2000 late 2001 and japan was supposedly an example of an economy that was

00:02:11.060 in utter crisis it had stagnated um for 10 years and was to stagnate for another 10 practically

00:02:18.020 while I was there, its GDP in nominal terms just did not move at all.

00:02:22.600 If it was a heart patient, Japan was dead.

00:02:25.580 And that is how people at the FT used to kind of,

00:02:30.300 you know, when people talked about Japan,

00:02:32.240 they'd talk in these kind of mournful, sort of sorrowful voices

00:02:35.740 like what happened there then, you know, why is it in such a mess?

00:02:39.160 And so I began to kind of think, well,

00:02:41.180 this is not reflecting the reality that I'm seeing around me,

00:02:43.740 which was a society with lots of problems for sure,

00:02:46.160 But incredibly dynamic. Tokyo certainly looked to me far richer than London. In many ways, quality of life was far better, I thought, than in Britain. And it certainly was not a society anyway that was stagnated. It was changing. It was moving. It was adapting. Maybe not always in the right ways.

00:03:05.020 But GDP didn't seem to be telling me anything at all that was really worth knowing about Japan.

00:03:09.600 And a politician came from London. I was taking him through the streets of Tokyo, which, you know, can be kind of overawing, really, in the sort of, you know, the stuff that's going on and the lights and the people lining up for incredible restaurants and all this activity.

00:03:23.220 And he said, David, if this is a recession, I want one.

00:03:27.280 So basically, I mean, I could go on, but basically I began to think, well, what is this number that we take so seriously?

00:03:35.020 And yet, you know, I have found just in my reporting that it doesn't always tell you, sometimes tells you, but it doesn't always tell you everything you need to know at all.

00:03:46.480 And so what is in this number and why have we come to take it so seriously?

00:03:50.800 So that's the genesis of my book.

00:03:53.620 So if you were going to explain GDP to an absolute layman who's never encountered it, how would you describe it?

00:03:59.500 OK, well, GDP was invented in the 1930s, so it's man-made, which is important to know.

00:04:05.640 It's not a gift from God.

00:04:07.240 As we treat it now.

00:04:08.280 As we treat it now.

00:04:09.400 You know, you could say height.

00:04:10.900 You could say metres and feet are man-made, but you're measuring something real.

00:04:15.700 GDP is measuring a kind of an artificial construct, I would say, first of all.

00:04:19.460 So it measures all the goods and services produced in a year at market prices.

00:04:27.720 It assigns a price to that.

00:04:29.760 So there's a rationality to it, but it's a measure of what economists call flow.

00:04:35.100 It only measures income.

00:04:37.740 It measures what you're producing in a particular period, and actually a period that's already gone in the past.

00:04:43.000 It doesn't tell you really that much about what might come in the future.

00:04:47.120 And for example, if you were looking at a company,

00:04:49.400 if you were investing in a company,

00:04:50.840 you wouldn't just look at its profits

00:04:52.360 because maybe its profits were brilliant last year,

00:04:55.560 but maybe it had sold off all its intellectual property,

00:04:58.080 fired all its workers, sold off all its machinery.

00:05:01.980 And next year, you knew it was going to make zero.

00:05:05.060 But someone investing in the company

00:05:06.520 would never settle for that.

00:05:07.760 They'd say, what's your balance sheet look like?

00:05:09.360 What are your assets?

00:05:10.640 And we don't do that with an economy.

00:05:14.240 We only look at the flow.

00:05:15.760 Now, there's much, much, much more that I can tell you about GDP,

00:05:18.600 but that's your sort of starting definition.

00:05:20.880 Well, that's really interesting.

00:05:22.080 So I read a few interviews with you, which were absolutely fascinating,

00:05:25.620 in particular one with the Washington Post,

00:05:27.360 and you were talking about things like theft being part of GDP.

00:05:31.240 Well, theft can be part of GDP.

00:05:32.900 GDP is meant to measure, and it varies from country to country,

00:05:35.720 which is important.

00:05:36.680 There's a sort of standardized measure,

00:05:38.080 but it doesn't mean that it's an exact science.

00:05:40.620 And when we talk about Britain's GDP and the US GDP and America's GDP,

00:05:44.180 Sorry, America is the U.S., isn't it?

00:05:48.360 My mother is Venezuelan and she says,

00:05:52.200 America is not the world, America is the whole continent.

00:05:55.980 That's exactly right.

00:05:58.560 America Latina, yeah, exactly, okay.

00:06:01.620 So they're not entirely comparable, but they are more or less, anyway.

00:06:07.280 Theft generally counts, if I steal your Porsche,

00:06:11.960 you have one, I believe.

00:06:13.000 i don't even have a driving license i saw it parked outside are you kidding anyway if i steal

00:06:22.780 your porsche that does not contribute to gdp however if i then sell your porsche onto you

00:06:27.800 and then go out and spend all my ill-gotten gains on something then i have absolutely

00:06:31.720 contributed to gdp because gdp is actually a measure another way of looking at it is kind

00:06:35.760 of velocity it's the it's the way that money moves through the system um if i sell you heroin

00:06:42.580 that absolutely counts as GDP

00:06:44.580 because Britain counts hard drugs

00:06:46.400 and prostitution

00:06:48.840 so we

00:06:50.640 count

00:06:51.080 heroin, amphetamines

00:06:54.800 cocaine, crack cocaine

00:06:57.020 ecstasy

00:06:59.260 and marijuana

00:06:59.940 so if you don't take one of those

00:07:02.560 Francis then you're really not doing your bit for GDP

00:07:04.860 you're not doing your bit

00:07:06.860 for the British economy

00:07:07.760 I'm going to tell my parents my university education

00:07:10.460 wasn't a waste after all

00:07:11.640 Exactly, you were really doing your bit there.

00:07:13.480 You were paying back your student grant before.

00:07:15.440 Yeah, contributing to the economy like a regular citizen.

00:07:19.660 So, I mean, we're laughing at it,

00:07:22.320 but one of the points you make in the book and elsewhere

00:07:25.660 is that this way of looking at GDP actually has serious consequences.

00:07:29.300 Well, my book's meant to be, A, quite entertaining,

00:07:31.960 but it is absolutely, it's meant to tell you,

00:07:33.720 it's meant to be a window or a door or a trap door

00:07:37.340 or whatever you want to call it,

00:07:38.940 into this, what appears to be an arcane subject,

00:07:41.340 The economy, economics, GDP, GDP went up 2.1%, you know, blah, blah, blah.

00:07:47.280 And we kind of glaze over.

00:07:49.380 A lot of people glaze over.

00:07:51.060 And yet, if you look at political manifestos, they always talk about the economy.

00:07:58.020 This is quite new, actually.

00:07:59.560 Until 1950, the economy and making the economy better and all of that was not mentioned in political manifestos.

00:08:06.620 I think in the last Tory party manifesto, it was mentioned about 80 times.

00:08:11.140 We will not do anything bad to the economy.

00:08:13.020 We must make policies that are good for the economy.

00:08:15.500 So I feel that it is kind of incumbent on us to know what it is we're talking about when we're talking about the economy.

00:08:19.960 And the way, the single way we measure our national economies, or the way that certainly is used in the sort of public discourse, is this weird number, GDP.

00:08:32.960 So I think that we ought to know more about it.

00:08:35.800 I mean, just to finish off that story, Brexit.

00:08:38.180 So just before the Brexit vote, there was a guy, Anna Menon, went up from University College London.

00:08:44.680 He went to Newcastle and he said, look, we cannot vote for Brexit.

00:08:47.740 This would be nuts.

00:08:49.700 You know, economists tell us this will be very damaging for our GDP.

00:08:54.180 And someone stood up in the audience and said, that's your bloody GDP.

00:08:57.200 That's not our GDP.

00:08:58.580 So this is something that's absolutely relevant to us.

00:09:01.440 And just to finish, finish, finish, Nicolas Sarkozy, former French president who commissioned a whole study into how we measure our well-being and our lives.

00:09:11.200 And he wrote a preface, which was extraordinarily good, actually.

00:09:14.160 And he said, look, when people look at their lives as measured by experts and they're told that their lives look a certain way, but it just doesn't feel like that, then they become angry.

00:09:25.140 And he said, and if there's that gap, nothing is more dangerous to democracy.

00:09:30.520 And I think that's quite prescient in an age of Duterte and Trump and Brexit and all sorts of other things.

00:09:37.260 I'm not saying that's the entire explanation, but I am saying that seems to touch a certain nerve of the world we're living in today.

00:09:44.680 Well, let's delve into that a little bit.

00:09:46.540 But actually, back to your point about the Geordie guy.

00:09:49.420 I lived in Scotland just before the referendum that happened there.

00:09:55.080 And one of the points that my Scottish friends were always making to me after I left in this discussion about the Scottish independence movement, they were always saying, well, the London elites are telling us that the economy is going to be better if we stay together.

00:10:08.320 And one of my Scottish friends said, that's like saying that someone else should sleep with my wife because he'd be better at it.

00:10:14.780 Do you know what I mean?

00:10:15.820 And I think this idea that the economy is the overwhelming thing that matters to everybody.

00:10:21.500 I don't think people actually find that that is their personal experience.

00:10:24.840 Well, it used to be, it's the economy's stupid.

00:10:26.760 That's what Bill Clinton said.

00:10:27.960 And there may have been a time when it was true.

00:10:29.940 I think it's not true now.

00:10:30.920 I think people think about other things.

00:10:32.700 And they also think that our definition of the economy doesn't match our lives.

00:10:37.000 Well, isn't that it?

00:10:37.540 Because, for example, in the time of the economy's stupid,

00:10:40.040 what they were really talking about is jobs, it's job security.

00:10:42.920 And these are things that are eroding now, particularly job security.

00:10:45.640 And it may be things that are more intangible than that,

00:10:48.180 like sense of community or safety.

00:10:49.920 Things that, for example, were very strong in Japan

00:10:51.760 that weren't being picked up at all.

00:10:53.060 Or, you know, I mean, look, our services are about 80% of our economies, but GDP is absolutely awful at measuring services.

00:10:59.740 It's very good at measuring tables and chairs and mugs and things you can drop on your foot or put in a wheelbarrow.

00:11:04.740 But it's dreadful at measuring haircuts and psychoanalysis sessions and investment banking products and, you know, Boeing engine service contracts and computer contracts and all the things that are actually part of our modern life.

00:11:17.920 GDP is very, very bad because it can't really figure out quality.

00:11:21.460 So we're using a measure of quantity, I would argue, to measure what is increasingly a life that's defined by quality.

00:11:29.340 And the other just sort of elephant in the room, sorry to use that horrible cliche, but is distribution.

00:11:34.660 And so you're talking about Scotland.

00:11:36.700 So when we talk about the economy is doing well, the economy is growing by 2%, that doesn't tell you anything about how that money is being distributed.

00:11:44.340 So the American economy has been doing quite well with a few dips for a long, long time.

00:11:49.420 But it's not doing quite well if you're a non-college graduate.

00:11:57.020 And even there are some numbers that suggest that median household wages have stagnated since the 1970s.

00:12:03.680 So, in fact, the economy growing is kind of bad for you because all you're doing is seeing other people doing better and you being left behind.

00:12:12.060 And that creates a huge anger or certainly can create a huge anger.

00:12:16.080 And there's a time when that tips from the American dream.

00:12:18.760 i too can make it to no i can't this has been going on too long the system's rigged against me

00:12:25.340 so you'll keep telling me that things are good and things are getting better and we're growing

00:12:29.360 and we're two times richer and three times richer and four times richer than we have been

00:12:32.700 well it bloody well doesn't feel like it to me um so i mean again to use another question uh to use

00:12:40.000 another cliche the million dollar question is how do we redress that balance where you know it seems

00:12:45.840 to be the rich are getting richer and people going hey you know what the economy is getting

00:12:50.920 better then you're going yeah but my wages haven't increased sure how what do we do well there are

00:12:57.340 there are two questions wrapped up in one there um you know one is how would we know so my book

00:13:03.980 is principally a book about in a sense measurement that makes it sound boring but i think all these

00:13:08.760 issues kind of stem stem from that so i mean my but but that is kind of the the orbit of my book

00:13:15.460 There are then policy prescriptions, you know, how might you redress this once you know it's actually happened.

00:13:21.980 You know, what I would say in my book is that we shouldn't make GDP, i.e. growing the entire economy, the be-all and end-all.

00:13:29.220 We could look at median household income, which is something that I just mentioned.

00:13:32.880 Just for anyone who's not familiar, sorry, David, for anyone who's not familiar with statistics, can you explain the difference between mean and median?

00:13:38.180 OK, yeah, it's quite it's a bit tricky. So mean is you would you would just you would add everything up and divide by the number of people.

00:13:47.340 So if you had. So, you know, there's an economist joke being an economist joke.

00:13:52.200 Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, it's not very funny. Bill Gates walks into a bar.

00:13:57.680 On average, everyone in the room is a billionaire. That's the mean. You didn't laugh.

00:14:02.600 that's sorry that's the mean you divide uh the room of 100 people by bill gates fortune and

00:14:10.760 everyone is a is a billionaire you know if you have um uh four people um and they have an average

00:14:17.660 uh income of 25 that's not bad um so long as one person doesn't have 100 in which case the

00:14:25.320 your other three have unfortunately starved to death and that's your mean um median is slightly

00:14:31.800 different median you line everybody up which I know sounds slightly you line everybody up and

00:14:39.800 you pick the middle person and so then it's not skewed by the fact that you've got Bill Gates

00:14:45.080 at this end and a few Bill Gates is kind of who have distorted the average and distorted

00:14:50.200 what you might think is a typical existence because the typical in a very sort of economically skewed

00:14:56.160 society is likely to be worse than the average would would suggest so so that's what median is

00:15:03.160 and that's why it's better than saying mean or average. So the median is like the most representative

00:15:08.680 of the middle ground. Nothing's nothing's perfect but yes and of course you might have a lot of very

00:15:14.200 poor people who are just kind of left out of that but yes it's the middle ground and so if you if

00:15:19.760 you shifted your number and so that people stood up and didn't say I'm going to grow the economy

00:15:25.480 by 3%, which Donald Trump said, but if he said,

00:15:28.060 I'm going to grow median household incomes, catchy,

00:15:31.380 and you can see it's going to catch on.

00:15:34.100 I'm fighting a winning battle here, by 3%.

00:15:37.060 Then that would skew your whole policy agenda.

00:15:41.700 Now, how you would get there is to be debated, you know,

00:15:44.920 redistribution, you know, subsidies, training, you know,

00:15:51.300 we can discuss the details, and that's politics.

00:15:53.800 Although one of the things I am arguing in my book, actually, is that numbers are politics.

00:15:57.420 You know, they're not just dry, because what we choose to measure actually sets our priorities for what we then try to create.

00:16:06.120 And sometimes that will be explicit, and sometimes it will be implicit.

00:16:08.860 We won't even notice that we've set this agenda without really knowing it.

00:16:13.700 So my starting point would be to slightly downgrade GDP.

00:16:18.060 It's not a useless number at all.

00:16:19.660 They called it the great invention of the 20th century, and that's not entirely unkind.

00:16:24.320 It's not entirely untrue, I mean.

00:16:27.040 But you could downgrade it slightly.

00:16:29.000 Don't take it as seriously as we do and elevate a few other numbers, numbers that might tell us about distribution, numbers that might tell us about sustainability, the wealth, what we're doing to a natural environment, what we're doing to our infrastructure.

00:16:44.380 So the details of that.

00:16:45.360 So median household income is number one.

00:16:47.240 What else would you want to incorporate?

00:16:48.960 I think you should have a proxy of sustainability.

00:16:54.260 You know, look, Saudi Arabia could be, and in fact is, you know, busily selling its oil creates a very high standard of living.

00:17:02.360 GDP is going fantastically well.

00:17:04.480 But what happens when the oil runs out?

00:17:06.600 GDP, our standard measure of the economy, tells you zero about that.

00:17:10.820 Now, it doesn't mean Saudi Arabia is stupid and they're not going to do anything about it.

00:17:13.840 In fact, they have a whole political turmoil now, part of which may be that that's exactly what they're trying to do.

00:17:19.520 They're trying to do something about it.

00:17:22.080 But some kind of measure of sustainability.

00:17:24.520 And there are measures.

00:17:25.580 Some of them are very technical.

00:17:27.720 And we can talk about those.

00:17:29.240 The World Bank has just come out with one, which I think is really interesting.

00:17:32.440 But you could also come up with a proxy.

00:17:34.740 And some of these things are just proxies.

00:17:36.120 You could say CO2, for example.

00:17:38.360 It wouldn't be perfect.

00:17:39.400 But you could say, you know, let's have a policy.

00:17:42.300 you know let's run a society where the aim is not merely to produce as much as we can

00:17:49.140 and you know hang the environment you could have a policy that said co2 or some other proxy of how

00:17:55.480 sustainable this growth is and which was kind of set a limit or would or would push you in

00:18:01.940 different directions so that if you wanted to grow and we can discuss what grow might mean

00:18:05.840 you could grow in ways that don't necessarily mean chucking tons of plastic into the oceans

00:18:10.740 for example which has been a preferred method um uh you know hitherto or you know you know burning

00:18:18.740 the ozone off or destroying all our rainforests or uh heating up the earth to such an extent that

00:18:25.460 you know it is already almost indubitably and and certainly will even more as we go forward

00:18:31.700 you know change weather patterns uh in ways that are highly unpredictable um and that could be

00:18:36.900 and are likely to be extremely damaging to lots of people.

00:18:40.120 Right. That's absolutely fascinating.

00:18:42.240 If we could just go back.

00:18:43.480 So you were talking about that gap.

00:18:45.780 We were talking about the gap between rich and poor.

00:18:48.120 How much do you think, I mean,

00:18:49.320 because I think that's one of the major reasons

00:18:51.360 why Trump got to power,

00:18:52.840 is because no politician addressed those people.

00:18:56.400 How much do you think capitalism is to blame?

00:19:00.280 How much is globalization to blame?

00:19:02.820 And what can we do, essentially, to try and fix it, really?

00:19:06.180 because it just seems that things are getting harder and harder.

00:19:10.040 Yeah, well, there's a lot going on.

00:19:12.260 So, you know, one of the themes of our age

00:19:15.500 is that we're becoming more and more unequal.

00:19:19.300 So a lot of people would nod their heads in that.

00:19:21.600 Are we?

00:19:21.940 Listening to your globally not.

00:19:24.980 Tell us the facts about that.

00:19:26.380 So globally not.

00:19:27.380 So what is happening is that, especially in wealthy countries,

00:19:30.840 that tends to be true.

00:19:32.100 If you look at, you know, the top 10% versus the bottom 10%,

00:19:35.520 And you tend to see this rising, the differential rising, and in some cases rising quite dramatically.

00:19:45.200 I mean, I've noticed that there are numbers in Britain that seem to dispute some of that.

00:19:48.520 But, you know, numbers that I've looked at would show that inequality has risen quite substantially.

00:19:54.060 It may have tailed off at certain points, but it's risen quite substantially over the last 20, 30 years.

00:19:58.360 In the U.S., it's risen an awful lot.

00:20:00.860 Even in egalitarian Japan, it rose.

00:20:03.360 It's risen in egalitarian Scandinavia.

00:20:05.520 So if you're in the top percent, college educated, do computer science or whatever, you know, you're global, you're international, you've got skills, you're doing really well now.

00:20:14.960 And if you're not, you're sort of falling behind.

00:20:18.100 However, there is another story and it's an important story that gets kind of lost in our debate, which is that whole other parts of the world, China being a very, you know, a prime example, are actually beginning to close that gap.

00:20:30.600 So if you look at the differential between, you know, Chinese income and U.S. or British income, you know, they've been closing that gap since the 1990s and, you know, at increasing kind of speed.

00:20:43.080 I used to know these numbers off by heart, but, you know, let's say in 1990, the differential was about 20.

00:20:51.780 It might be about four now.

00:20:53.380 I mean, this is like a freight train coming.

00:20:55.440 So in that sense, inequality is not increasing.

00:21:00.600 globally and globalization has actually been good but it's been good if you're Chinese yeah

00:21:05.780 and it's been good if you're Indian now I'm a globalist so to me that is great uh because I

00:21:11.980 think that you know China and India have been exploited chopped about by colonialism pushed

00:21:17.480 out of the global system and you know they now have managed to incorporate themselves in and it's

00:21:23.660 it's you know it's not perfect by any means I mean it's you know um you know politically or

00:21:28.960 economically or in terms of social justice you know but the tendency is definitely that those

00:21:34.260 countries are catching up but it does create all sorts of upheavals in our own countries and we

00:21:40.640 need to you know you don't necessarily need to ditch globalization to deal with that although

00:21:45.100 you might you might do at some point but you don't have to but what you what you do need to do

00:21:50.020 is have policies that smooth that ride,

00:21:55.160 which may well involve training, technology, distribution,

00:22:01.800 universal basic income, higher inheritance tax

00:22:06.060 to make things fairer when people die.

00:22:08.420 They can't just kind of pass on privilege

00:22:10.100 in a kind of Piketty-style fashion to the next generation.

00:22:15.640 So a combination of all those,

00:22:17.440 But it would need to be a much more kind of rigorous policy if you really think that that's important.

00:22:21.980 I mean, I personally do think that's important because some people don't.

00:22:24.600 Some people think inequality is, you know, even in a place like America or Britain, some people argue it's good.

00:22:29.600 I disagree with this entirely.

00:22:30.980 They'd say it's motivational, you know.

00:22:32.540 And why do you disagree with it?

00:22:34.700 Because I think that people are often wealthy by fortune, the fortune of birth, fortune of the school they went to, fortune of their connections.

00:22:44.960 There's a lot of luck.

00:22:45.860 They may have trampled over lots of people on their way to get wealthy.

00:22:49.000 That if we just say, you know, he's 10 times wealthier than I,

00:22:54.020 so he must be 10 times better, I absolutely reject that.

00:22:58.140 So I don't like this idea of a meritocracy of wealth.

00:23:00.980 But in fact, one of the things you talk about is that inequality is bad for society.

00:23:05.500 Well, yeah, I don't talk about it that much.

00:23:06.940 There are old books about this, but I absolutely think it is.

00:23:11.020 I mean, look, I used to be an idealist.

00:23:13.340 I'm probably less of an idealist than I used to be.

00:23:15.040 happens with age doesn't it it does how old are you saying I am

00:23:19.340 but you know so I think some inequality is inevitable because you know we could distribute

00:23:25.380 the same amount of money to the four of us and you know probably you'd end up really wealthy and

00:23:29.600 he and I'd end up on the street you'd have to sell your push you know so you know no matter

00:23:34.880 how much you try you know you you know but what I am interested in is equality of opportunity

00:23:40.740 Look, there are whole studies and there's a whole chapter on happiness. And happiness, I think, has been in my book, I should say. Happiness, I think, has been a little bit sort of undermined and ridiculed in a sense by this whole Bhutanese, you know, gross national happiness, where Bhutan put forward happiness instead of GDP or economic expansion.

00:24:03.100 And while it may have been onto something,

00:24:04.700 I think it's a sort of fairly flawed exercise.

00:24:06.660 Again, we could talk about that if you'd like.

00:24:09.560 But looking at this more rigorously,

00:24:11.740 I actually found that when you measure happiness,

00:24:15.280 economists call it subjective well-being

00:24:17.520 because it sounds posher and you might take it more seriously.

00:24:20.720 How do you feel?

00:24:21.760 How is your subjective well-being?

00:24:23.960 Well, it's pretty good today.

00:24:25.620 Better for that coffee.

00:24:28.360 If we were filming at night and had a glass of wine,

00:24:30.340 it would be better still.

00:24:32.460 But, look, so a lot of subjective well-being tests and, you know, studies would show more or less the following, that if you're very poor, you're unhappy.

00:24:45.000 You know, if you can't send your kids to school, if you can't put a roof over your head, if you worry about where the next meal is coming from or what happens if you get sick, you will be unhappy.

00:24:56.780 And you will tell someone on a, they call it the canteral ladder scale, you will tell someone, I'm really feeling unhappy.

00:25:04.120 Now, once you begin to satisfy those, what you might call basic needs, human rights, whatever you want to call them, and you get to a certain level of wealth or income, we could argue about what that is.

00:25:16.040 Let's say it's $15,000 per capita or $20,000 per capita.

00:25:19.940 What the studies find is that you actually don't move much up.

00:25:24.420 More money after that doesn't make you happy.

00:25:25.780 More money after that doesn't make much difference.

00:25:27.820 It doesn't increase your subjective well-being.

00:25:28.840 It doesn't increase, yeah, let's get it right.

00:25:30.520 It does not increase your subjective well-being,

00:25:32.620 all this, you know, street talk, happiness.

00:25:34.620 So if you've got your 15 grand a year, you're okay, right?

00:25:37.660 Yes.

00:25:38.460 That's what the studies would suggest.

00:25:39.240 That's what the studies would suggest.

00:25:40.880 Now, think of it in a different way.

00:25:42.340 Let me tell you two kind of anecdotes

00:25:43.940 that might sort of bring this to life.

00:25:46.140 So if you're in a football match and you're all sat down

00:25:48.900 and then one guy stands up, craning his neck,

00:25:52.680 and then someone else behind him stands up

00:25:54.280 and then someone else stands up

00:25:55.660 And before you know it, the whole stadium is stood up.

00:25:58.180 Now, they have exactly the same view of the match that they had before,

00:26:02.320 but they now all have the inconvenience of having stood up

00:26:05.540 and having to stand up through the whole match.

00:26:08.740 And that, you could argue, is the kind of rat race cycle

00:26:12.240 that we've kind of got ourselves into.

00:26:14.320 We're all stood up.

00:26:15.320 You know, next we'll have to be on tippy-toes just to get, you know,

00:26:17.820 even better and then maybe get a step ladder so that –

00:26:20.600 and none of us are going to get a better view of the match.

00:26:22.680 None of us are going to have better subjective well-being

00:26:24.640 or feel more happy, in fact, we'll feel less happy

00:26:26.940 because we're having to work harder

00:26:28.680 for exactly the same view of the match.

00:26:31.540 Now, different analogy.

00:26:35.160 There's a great experiment

00:26:36.260 where they put two cappuccine monkeys,

00:26:39.260 and if you haven't looked it up, look it up on YouTube.

00:26:41.200 I think I've seen this.

00:26:42.000 So there's two monkeys, kind of everyone's seen it now,

00:26:45.480 in these perspex cages,

00:26:47.700 and they perform a simple task.

00:26:50.440 They hand over little pebbles,

00:26:52.180 and in return for a pebble, they get given a cucumber.

00:26:54.640 and they're both happy as Larry or happy as cappuccino monkeys

00:26:58.540 or happy as people watching a good football match or whatever.

00:27:02.060 And then one of the trainers starts giving one of the monkeys grapes,

00:27:05.960 which are better.

00:27:06.740 They're sweeter, tastier.

00:27:08.560 And the other monkey immediately, but immediately, gets irate.

00:27:12.680 It starts shaking the cage.

00:27:14.220 It flings the cucumber back at the – and it will not accept these cucumbers.

00:27:18.720 It is unhappy now because of relative reasons.

00:27:22.380 The experiment is called Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay.

00:27:26.080 And that was meant to be a joke.

00:27:27.800 But that is actually what the experiment is called.

00:27:31.300 You've got a perfect comedian move there.

00:27:33.200 Because if you make a joke and it falls flat, that's what you do.

00:27:36.200 You say that was meant to be a joke.

00:27:37.420 It's the audience's fault.

00:27:39.220 Yeah, absolutely.

00:27:39.820 Always.

00:27:40.500 Always.

00:27:40.900 Always.

00:27:41.780 Always.

00:27:42.380 Yeah.

00:27:42.880 So that's a little bit about the kind of the happiness quandary.

00:27:47.080 So, and I remember watching a TED talk, I think, and reading some stuff by a Swedish researcher who was talking about the fact that when you take pretty much every measure of subjective well-being.

00:28:01.120 You're learning.

00:28:01.800 Yeah, I'm picking this up quickly.

00:28:03.960 And you plot that against income inequality within a developed country like Britain, like America, like Western.

00:28:10.820 What you find is essentially every measure of ill-being goes up as inequality goes up.

00:28:16.240 So people, there's more teenage pregnancy, there's more people in prison, there's more violence, there's more crime, there's more everything.

00:28:23.480 There's something called, there's a book called The Spirit Level.

00:28:25.160 There's been a few other books that absolutely tend to suggest this.

00:28:28.260 And you can feel it, can't you?

00:28:29.420 I mean, you know, you could be living perfectly content.

00:28:31.800 The guy next door gets a Porsche.

00:28:33.180 I'll keep going back to your Porsche.

00:28:34.880 And, you know, now I want a Porsche.

00:28:36.900 And it's sort of, you know, you kind of hate yourself for it, but you sort of want it.

00:28:40.820 And you sort of can feel this creep up on you.

00:28:44.440 And that I would suggest, I mean, that's the sort of depressing bit of my book in a sense, because although I kind of say growth is a delusion and we kind of need to wake up, kind of there's something that tells me that there's something in all of us, me included, that's just not going to, that there is this competitive need to stay ahead.

00:29:01.980 Because look, if you go to a beach in the Bahamas or whatever, and nobody on that beach is going to come and serve you cocktails because they're all paid twice what you get paid, you're not going to like that beach.

00:29:13.340 You know, to some extent, your experiences are enjoyable because of the exclusivity of those experiences.

00:29:21.280 So it's almost built in.

00:29:22.760 You know, if you go to a restaurant and the chef says, well, sod this, I'm not cooking for you.

00:29:26.440 You know, give me a thousand pounds and maybe I'll cook you a meal.

00:29:29.580 You know, your enjoyment of a restaurant meal is that someone's prepared to work for 20 quid an hour or whatever it is.

00:29:36.620 and so there is this kind of thing that's built into humanity maybe depressingly that means that

00:29:44.240 we're on this kind of hamster wheel yeah that's very interesting number one if anybody from porsche

00:29:49.660 is actually watching the show um and would like to do and donate or sponsor please do we would

00:29:55.680 uh be very we'd be very grateful it'll be three though you're gonna make us unhappy yeah have you

00:30:01.560 You got a Porsche?

00:30:02.460 No, it's three Porsches.

00:30:04.580 I'm with him, no driving license.

00:30:05.940 So, yeah, I'll get my girlfriend to drive me around in my Porsche.

00:30:09.620 I don't even have a girlfriend, so you're one of them.

00:30:15.020 Number two, are you saying that capitalism makes us miserable?

00:30:19.720 Possibly, aspects of it.

00:30:21.000 I mean, look, you'd have to define capitalism, wouldn't you?

00:30:23.780 The acquirement of material possessions.

00:30:25.340 I mean, I don't think socialism or communism made us much happier.

00:30:28.560 I'm from the Soviet Union, yeah, I know.

00:30:30.400 So, you know, that's a term.

00:30:33.640 So I'd be a bit uncomfortable with that.

00:30:36.020 The pursuit of material gold.

00:30:37.480 Certainly can.

00:30:39.240 You know, but I mean, mine isn't a self-help book.

00:30:42.020 It's not a, you know, I mean, look,

00:30:43.060 if you want to live in an empty room and live on experiences.

00:30:46.300 I mean, look, but I think despite our kind of, you know,

00:30:50.420 sort of collecting society and we are sort of almost,

00:30:54.640 there's certainly a sub-trend of that.

00:30:56.960 If you think what people collect now, actually,

00:30:59.520 I mean, it's not very healthy in some senses, but they collect experiences that they can project, you know, onto social media.

00:31:07.880 That's it's kind of ethereal or they or they collect music, the experience of music, but it just has to be streamed.

00:31:15.260 You don't need a record collection. So, you know, even in this uncluttered, technological, heavy, materialistic world we live in, you can kind of see something fighting to come out.

00:31:26.800 and yeah I mean look I used to not carry a camera around for 20 odd years I've traveled

00:31:31.340 all over the world and I remember one time I was hitching through Africa as a 19 year old

00:31:36.060 and I had a sort of crappy little camera but the camera was everything to me because I wanted to

00:31:41.180 capture these experiences and so you know I don't know why it's hard to analyze yourself but so I

00:31:47.180 could show people impress people I didn't so I could remember I'm not quite sure but I do remember

00:31:52.400 thinking like preserving this camera keeping this camera and keeping these rolls of film is like so

00:31:57.780 important to me to such an extent that it could even get in the way of your experience of what

00:32:02.180 you're actually experienced at the time so at that after that I took this kind of zen-like

00:32:07.300 attitude really until the you know modern mobile phones of never carrying a camera so I'd go to

00:32:13.000 tons of places and I'd see you know to my mind astonishing things in the natural world in the

00:32:18.360 You know, in the human world, in the physical world, and I would look at them and kind of try to commit them to memory and look at them unfiltered, not through a lens.

00:32:28.020 You could say that's kind of Zen.

00:32:29.620 You could say that's anti-collecting things.

00:32:32.260 But I was collecting stuff.

00:32:33.460 I was collecting memory.

00:32:35.460 In the end, it's all going to go.

00:32:36.820 You know, you can collect a Porsche.

00:32:38.140 It's gone when you die or when it's stolen or when someone rams into it.

00:32:42.580 You can collect memories and they're gone when you die or if you, you know, your memory begins to go and if you get Alzheimer's or whatever.

00:32:48.360 So everything is ethereal.

00:32:50.220 But my book is not this kind of zen.

00:32:52.640 You've got me on to this.

00:32:53.840 If you wanted some positivity,

00:32:55.800 this is...

00:32:57.300 Collect memories until your brain...

00:32:59.420 Until your brain turns into mush.

00:33:02.080 And you die alone.

00:33:07.560 We're all laughing because we know it's true.

00:33:09.780 Absolutely.

00:33:12.040 He's got all the comedian moves.

00:33:13.760 He's explaining his own jokes.

00:33:15.160 This is great.

00:33:16.060 Well, since we're on the subject of happiness,

00:33:18.360 i didn't notice is there a way you think that i remember you talked about the time but actually

00:33:27.800 david cameron i think in 2015 he proposed this measure of uh public happiness or whatever it

00:33:34.840 was called he was broadly ridiculed by everybody he was yeah um it's easy to ridicule and i was

00:33:40.580 quite surprised by that because i've always thought actually you know happiness is quite

00:33:44.040 an important measure of what's happening in society and i've just finished reading sapiens

00:33:48.280 by an Israeli historian whose name I can neither know.

00:33:50.620 Yuval Noah Harari.

00:33:51.760 Thank you. Perfect.

00:33:53.040 And one of the things he talks about is actually evolutionary success.

00:33:56.400 The fact that there's lots of certain kind of creatures

00:33:59.080 is not in any way a reflection of their experience of life.

00:34:03.620 So, for example, domesticated cattle are hugely populous in the world right now

00:34:09.220 and live absolutely horrible, horrible lives.

00:34:14.220 Even though from an evolutionary point,

00:34:16.020 they're one of the most successful creatures in the world.

00:34:18.280 Are we kind of at that point ourselves that we've enslaved ourselves in this way?

00:34:23.380 Well, possibly. Yeah. I mean, I've also read that book and his subsequent book.

00:34:27.700 He has this wonderful chapter on the agricultural revolution, which is meant to be the great leap of humanity.

00:34:33.140 When we stopped, you know, messing around in forest, hunted, gathering and started, you know,

00:34:40.280 agricultural communities that's, you know, freed up some people to be poets and comedians and manufacturers and all of that.

00:34:47.280 And, you know, off society went.

00:34:49.680 He has this really counterintuitive sort of explanation of this.

00:34:53.400 A, he says, you know, people's diets completely collapsed.

00:34:56.680 And, in fact, apparently life expectancy collapsed at that time

00:35:00.780 because people were wandering around the forest

00:35:03.000 and they were eating a great variety of stuff.

00:35:05.780 And then they became kind of mono-dietary people,

00:35:10.320 whatever the word is.

00:35:11.700 They were just eating one thing.

00:35:12.780 They were also doing back-breaking work.

00:35:15.320 But even more interestingly, he said they'd become slaves to wheat

00:35:19.180 because the wheat gene passed from being quite sort of narrowly confined

00:35:24.800 and went all over the world.

00:35:27.200 So humans, from roaming around happy as Larry,

00:35:30.560 suddenly started working in this back-breaking toil for wheat.

00:35:36.120 Yeah, I mean, this is his.

00:35:37.800 So there we were, you know, praising ourselves,

00:35:41.040 increasing our numbers so that we could work harder for wheat.

00:35:45.900 Meanwhile, wheat is spreading all over the planet.

00:35:49.080 So, you know, we think we've taken over.

00:35:50.560 Maybe wheat's taken over.

00:35:52.340 Well, it's absolutely fascinating, this whole conversation.

00:35:55.440 And just coming back to we've talked a little bit about how we might measure well-being,

00:36:01.240 measure growth, measure GDP or whatever it is.

00:36:04.460 But what is the cost of what we're doing now?

00:36:06.720 Because one of the things you talk about in the book

00:36:08.480 and in other places that I've seen you speak as well,

00:36:11.580 is the fact that, for example,

00:36:13.580 when we measure GDP as basically something that gets sold or not sold,

00:36:18.280 if, say, you have children, right,

00:36:20.720 and you don't pay someone else to raise them,

00:36:23.660 you raise them yourself.

00:36:24.660 Yes.

00:36:25.080 That is not a contribution to GDP,

00:36:27.200 even though statistically it's very likely to be better for your children

00:36:30.020 than having them brought up by a stranger.

00:36:32.220 Yes.

00:36:32.520 Breast milk is a good example.

00:36:33.760 Tell us about that.

00:36:34.340 Well, so breast milk contributes zero to GDP,

00:36:36.860 But, you know, any dietician, nutrition will tell you that this is the best thing, you know, that a mother can do for her child.

00:36:45.320 And yet, you know, in the developing world, you know, you might have ad campaigns and people trying to encourage people to go back to work, contribute to the economy, you know, and you can buy powder, you know, you can dilute it with water, you know, of questionable origin or, you know, good, bad or indifferent.

00:37:02.380 and health of children

00:37:05.600 in the next generations will suffer

00:37:07.500 but your contribution to the economy

00:37:09.460 has gone up.

00:37:10.360 Did you not even say that you can reduce child mortality

00:37:12.900 by 20% by breastfeeding or something along those lines?

00:37:15.620 There are some staggering

00:37:17.100 numbers, yes

00:37:19.280 and it's particularly strong in the developing world

00:37:21.640 and you can see if you're a politician

00:37:22.820 and someone comes to you and says

00:37:24.300 we could have a breastfeeding campaign

00:37:27.000 that will cost X

00:37:28.000 or I can build a great big factory down the road

00:37:30.400 we can employ all these people

00:37:31.900 they'll pay tax you know you might be able to take a bit of a backhander you know uh what sounds

00:37:37.560 good to you so the fact that we kind of monetize bits of the economy and call that the economy

00:37:42.800 and the other bits of the economy every bit is real um are not monetized and not counted

00:37:49.000 sets up these kind of weird invisible incentives i think and that by definition we may not be aware

00:37:55.280 of or not aware of but it can kind of skew um the the direction that society is going and not

00:38:01.660 always for the better. And what are the other examples? Sorry, Francis, what are the examples

00:38:05.240 of how this way of measuring growth affects us? Well, pollution could be another good one. So,

00:38:10.640 you know, if your goal is to maximize output, then not only do we measure pollution as a kind

00:38:17.700 of byproduct of whatever it is we're making. So if you take China, you know, it's been growing at

00:38:21.060 10% a year for years. And a lot of that growth is absolutely real. It's been transformative.

00:38:25.580 I'm not knocking growth, especially in poor countries.

00:38:30.020 But part of that growth has been just awful, you know, fouling up the air, fouling up the rivers, destroying biodiversity, some of which will be irreversible.

00:38:42.760 But if we try to reverse it, clean up the air, clean up the rivers, that will also contribute to GDP.

00:38:47.080 So you double count stuff that is, you know, bad for us.

00:38:52.000 And yet to our standard gauge of economics, standard gauge of what an economy is, you know, we don't differentiate.

00:39:02.080 As long as it's bought, sold, the bought and sold, it's good no matter what it is.

00:39:06.220 It could be armaments. So the more arms you produce, the more wars that go on, the more cities you destroy and have to rebuild.

00:39:13.780 You know, all of that is good for the flow of income.

00:39:18.460 You've destroyed wealth in the process, not to mention lives, but it's good for the economy.

00:39:25.940 There must be something wrong with a measure that, you know, that puts that on a pedestal

00:39:31.580 and that finds it harder to look at these, you know, what economists call externalities

00:39:37.560 or side effects of our growth.

00:39:40.260 That's very, very interesting.

00:39:42.260 We're going to be moving on a little bit now.

00:39:44.600 So you were talking, so you're an Africa correspondent.

00:39:47.440 I mean, that is a huge amount of land to be a correspondent for.

00:39:51.900 Editor, in fact.

00:39:52.660 Yeah, an editor, yes.

00:39:53.760 So, I mean, how does that work?

00:39:56.360 So you're everywhere from Algeria right the way through to Zimbabwe?

00:39:59.840 Well, actually, I don't cover North Africa.

00:40:02.020 So I'm the sub-Saharan African.

00:40:04.500 So it's a mere 50 countries.

00:40:08.020 So, you know, I can breathe a sigh of relief.

00:40:09.920 Look, yes, it's a very complicated, challenging job

00:40:13.640 because there are 50 countries with different histories,

00:40:16.100 with different languages, with different cultures,

00:40:17.660 with different economies, with different presidents,

00:40:20.600 with different visa requirements.

00:40:24.300 And, you know, I suppose I'm expected to know about,

00:40:28.420 if not all of them, then an awful lot of them,

00:40:30.880 and to, you know, report news and trends

00:40:33.360 and business opportunities and cultural changes

00:40:36.440 and, you know, exciting technological developments

00:40:40.220 and just, you know, and human rights abuses

00:40:42.560 and politics and economics.

00:40:45.300 And, you know, and I tend to write across the gamut.

00:40:48.200 I occasionally sleep.

00:40:49.980 I sleep on aircraft when I'm flying down to Africa.

00:40:53.520 Look, I'm based in London

00:40:54.520 and part of me thinks I should be based somewhere in Africa.

00:40:57.640 But of course Africa is, I mean, the bit of Africa I cover is 50 countries.

00:41:00.560 So if you're in South Africa, then by definition,

00:41:03.020 you're not in Nigeria or you're not in Malawi or you're not in Kenya.

00:41:06.440 And to some extent, it makes sense to cover it from here and to keep flying down and then fly back up.

00:41:10.900 And links, partly as a sort of hangover of colonialism, links between African countries are not that good.

00:41:16.380 So it can be extraordinarily expensive, costly, cumbersome to move between countries that on a map look side by side.

00:41:23.420 It can be easier, bizarrely, to fly back up to London and then down again.

00:41:27.120 Really? So it's easier to fly from a country to go via London?

00:41:33.460 It can be.

00:41:34.440 I mean, this is now being eroded, thank God, slightly.

00:41:38.100 But, you know, especially if you have a country that was colonized by the French and a country that colonized by the British and they're next door to each other.

00:41:45.440 I mean, you know, it started off with telephone systems.

00:41:48.000 So you used to route the telephone call through the capital of one colonial power to the capital of the other colonial power and back down to the other colonized power.

00:41:57.020 And those kind of patterns become kind of structures.

00:42:00.140 And this is, I mean, and it's important because, you know, this is very damaging to the way economies, cultures, all sorts of things work because they always tend to be in reference to the former colonial power and the colonial power, A, were highly exploitative and B, weren't around for that long.

00:42:17.100 They came, they grabbed, they smashed, they left. And, you know, and now countries that weren't really countries in the current form have to now get on with being nation states and, you know, maximizing potential for their own populations.

00:42:35.480 And it's tricky. So it's tricky for them. And it's very tricky for me to grapple with all of this. But that's why it's a fascinating, wonderful job.

00:42:42.040 Wow. So what country do you do most of your reporting? Is there ones that you particularly pay attention to?

00:42:48.420 Yeah, there are some. So South Africa has been a big deal for us recently.

00:42:53.680 I mean, it's the biggest or second biggest economy. It changes depending on exchange rate fluctuations.

00:42:59.300 Nigeria is the other very big one. And so South Africa, you know, is a big kind of motor of the African economy.

00:43:07.800 There's a lot of investment goes into South Africa. There's obviously a lot of mining.

00:43:10.920 But I think even more important than all of those, really, I mean, so much was kind of, you know, the world's attention used to be on South Africa during the whole anti-apartheid stuff.

00:43:19.780 You know, then you had the fall of the white government.

00:43:21.420 You had, you know, the rise of the ANC, Nelson Mandela.

00:43:24.680 There was great sort of hope.

00:43:26.080 And we know the drama and the figures involved and kind of watching South Africa now, sometimes watching it go wrong, sometimes watching it go right, you know, is just sort of fascinating in its own right.

00:43:38.520 So, you know, Cyril Ramaphosa, who was a union leader and who was Mandela's choice to take over as president, but was ousted in the ANC, became a very, very wealthy businessman, then became vice president under Jacob Zuma.

00:43:53.200 Jacob Zuma dragging the country down into kind of towards catastrophe, I would say.

00:43:58.100 And then Ramaphosa strikes late last year, becomes the president.

00:44:01.900 And I got an hour with him last week with my editor.

00:44:05.900 We interviewed him.

00:44:06.720 and that is an amazing arc there's an amazing history there there's an awful lot to talk about

00:44:12.660 and you can bring you know the drama of a country like South Africa alive through an interview like

00:44:17.480 that and and so South Africa that's a very long answer to a short question South Africa has been

00:44:22.900 one but by no means all I mean I've spent quite a lot of time in Nigeria which is also really

00:44:28.620 interesting I've sort of picked on little countries for some reason so I spent a bit of time in

00:44:32.560 Liberia, which is somewhere I knew nothing about beforehand,

00:44:36.000 but which I've become kind of, you know, interested in.

00:44:39.220 I spend a fair bit of time in Kenya.

00:44:41.900 DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, I write a fair bit about.

00:44:47.840 You know, there's quite a lot of places.

00:44:49.100 Mozambique, for some other reason, I found myself going to a few times.

00:44:51.840 And what are the challenges do you think some of those countries face?

00:44:55.340 Because I'll be honest with you, I don't think in the UK,

00:44:57.760 we know a lot about them.

00:44:59.900 If you're not the average person, maybe not.

00:45:02.020 It's for London, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa.

00:45:05.920 Yeah.

00:45:06.640 I think everyone knows Liberia of our age because George Ware.

00:45:09.020 Yeah.

00:45:09.560 George Ware.

00:45:10.480 And he's now president.

00:45:11.720 Who I've met.

00:45:12.560 Have you met George Ware?

00:45:13.420 I have met George Ware.

00:45:14.360 Have you played football with George Ware?

00:45:15.520 I have not.

00:45:16.040 No, I think you might beat me.

00:45:18.260 I wouldn't be able to stop myself.

00:45:20.140 It is a one-on-one game.

00:45:20.160 Former world football of the year.

00:45:21.360 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:45:22.260 So, yeah.

00:45:22.840 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:45:23.440 And the Ballon d'Or, I think.

00:45:24.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:45:25.160 Yeah.

00:45:26.760 So, what was the question?

00:45:28.060 Well, actually, I mean, the thing is with Africa, like Francis is saying,

00:45:31.140 I don't think anyone really knows anything.

00:45:32.560 I think the way we think about Africa, we talk about Africa,

00:45:34.960 it's very much like Donald Trump talks about Europe.

00:45:37.000 It's like one homogenous bloke.

00:45:39.420 Sure, absolutely, which obviously really annoys anyone in Africa.

00:45:43.480 Africa is a country, meaning Africa is not a country, is a kind of a meme.

00:45:49.900 So I'm very careful.

00:45:52.320 I mean, occasionally one can talk about Africa as a unit,

00:45:55.700 and it makes sense just like you might talk about Europe or the Americas

00:45:58.800 or Asia, you know, from

00:46:00.860 Bangladesh to Japan, it might make sense

00:46:02.900 to talk about those countries, you

00:46:04.900 know, as a unit, but generally it

00:46:06.920 makes much more sense to talk about individual

00:46:08.740 countries or individual regions.

00:46:10.660 I mean, look, the first big challenge that African

00:46:12.860 countries have is that they're not

00:46:14.740 self-defined countries.

00:46:17.080 You know, they were drawn on a map

00:46:18.940 in Berlin by

00:46:20.540 guys with moustaches, many of

00:46:22.880 them had never been to the continent

00:46:25.060 that they were carving up among the

00:46:26.700 colonial powers, and, you know, that has

00:46:28.680 created an enormous damage um you know you have people who speak the same language on different

00:46:32.680 sides of borders um you know you have people who have nothing really in common who are you know

00:46:38.340 thrown into the same country and and they have to build a sense of nation state a sense of purpose

00:46:43.880 um you know a sense of project which you know what i saw in asia for example in china in japan

00:46:50.380 in korea had been you know sort of two thousand three thousand four thousand five thousand year

00:46:55.940 cultures and while you know african cultures are in a sense the oldest of the lot but in their

00:47:02.000 modern formation in the state of nigeria or the state of kenya um their modern creations and that

00:47:10.380 that's the that's the first problem and is that why you see the ethnic and religious conflicts

00:47:15.360 all over the continent that we probably have heard of uh yes although i think we also kind

00:47:21.120 of exaggerate i mean uh for a start there's very there have been very few wars between african

00:47:26.720 countries i mean you know you might you know that may be our view but i would say it's a prejudice

00:47:31.000 view if you want to if you want war killing mayhem look to europe that's where we've had more of it

00:47:36.080 than anywhere else these borders artificially drawn there haven't been many wars between african

00:47:40.840 states but within there's been yes like a nigeria religious tension or rwanda absolutely rwanda you

00:47:48.940 know was what there was a genocide yeah I mean you know there's no two ways about that um you know

00:47:54.160 you you can trace that back to the Belgians kind of trying to distinguish between you know in a

00:47:59.600 very kind of racist way trying to say you are Hutu you are Tutsis and there is a strong argument that

00:48:04.140 people didn't really think in that way beforehand so some of this may be actually you know the

00:48:09.360 colonialist powers have kind of fomented this but yeah look I mean different peoples with different

00:48:13.760 languages different beliefs uh you know unless they can find a way of getting on with each other

00:48:19.520 sometimes don't get on with each other we've seen that throughout history and you know and that

00:48:23.740 that's true in in many african countries but i i would challenge the notion that um you know that

00:48:31.320 there's more violence more turmoil and more inter-ethnic rivalry i mean look at britain

00:48:38.280 you know uh you know we've been you know a country sort of self-determined country for

00:48:44.000 hundreds and hundreds of years we're still arguing about the scots the welsh the english

00:48:49.000 we're still arguing about immigration we're still arguing about whether we're part of europe or not

00:48:53.580 um you know but if i called that you know tribal england tribal britain you'd be right up there

00:48:59.800 with a mainstream of public opinion right now you said that i think let's be honest but um but all

00:49:06.020 i'm saying is one has to be one has to be careful and you shouldn't look through the you know the

00:49:09.860 it's it's easy to fall into sort of stereotypical so give us an overview what is happening on the

00:49:15.360 continent right now what should we think about what should we know about what is it the people

00:49:19.260 in the west who don't know anything about africa you know think about it okay well there are a few

00:49:23.980 things and then they're by no means all good but some of them are good so i would say africa is

00:49:28.900 africa there you go parts of africa are becoming uh more democratic and i've been actually really

00:49:35.420 sort of impressed by

00:49:36.900 people on the

00:49:39.500 streets sort of idealism about what

00:49:41.440 democracy means this is a real

00:49:43.320 contrast with you know the west

00:49:45.300 where you know younger people

00:49:47.240 lots of surveys show are kind of more and more

00:49:49.480 disenchanted with democracy

00:49:50.800 and in the United States there are

00:49:53.300 surveys that show you know should the military

00:49:55.360 take over you know

00:49:56.720 it's scary it's like 25% isn't it

00:49:58.720 scary as fuck

00:50:00.500 what want a military dictatorship

00:50:02.380 I don't know the numbers but 50 years ago it would have been nobody

00:50:04.920 And it's just creeping up massively.

00:50:07.180 Or do you think one strong man could sort out this country?

00:50:11.220 Answer, you know.

00:50:12.480 It's gone like this.

00:50:13.620 So what you're seeing is a disenchantment with democracy in large swathes of the West.

00:50:19.480 And Africa is actually going the other way.

00:50:21.160 You get people doing extraordinarily moving things, you know, campaigning, lining up,

00:50:28.300 walking to polling booths, voting once, voting twice, voting three times,

00:50:32.540 taking pictures on their mobile phones of ballot sheets and uploading them, having a whole kind of civil society thing to make sure that the result of the election is fair.

00:50:41.320 And so many people that I've heard, whether in Ghana or Nigeria or Kenya or Liberia, saying, we don't mind who wins, but we want the election to be fair.

00:50:51.060 And we want the person who loses to step down, go with grace.

00:50:54.700 And this doesn't always happen.

00:50:56.700 So in the Democratic Republic of Congo, you've got Joseph Kabila, who's refusing to go.

00:51:03.160 But it's happening all over the place.

00:51:04.500 So there was just an election in Sierra Leone, which I don't think made headline news here, but, you know, but it made a little bit of news.

00:51:09.920 You had an election in Liberia, which actually did kind of briefly make headline news.

00:51:13.980 So you'd had a woman who'd been in power, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, actually the first elected female leader in Africa,

00:51:20.700 who had been in for two terms, her time was up,

00:51:25.540 her party lost the election, she stepped down,

00:51:29.020 her party conceded defeat.

00:51:30.940 And that is becoming much, much more the norm.

00:51:33.740 So I was in Gambia the beginning of 2000,

00:51:37.320 I'm just trying to think, the beginning of 2017,

00:51:39.920 when there'd just been an election

00:51:41.600 and there was a mad kind of dictator called Yahya Jame

00:51:46.280 who said he was going to be in power,

00:51:48.180 I think it was for a billion years.

00:51:50.700 Sounds like Donald Trump.

00:51:52.120 Ambitious character.

00:51:53.500 Trump is, you know, quite ambitious, let's say.

00:51:56.020 You know, he missed his, I've sometimes done the,

00:51:57.660 because he's now out of power,

00:51:58.960 so I've sometimes done the calculation

00:52:00.200 how many years he's missed his target by.

00:52:02.840 He lost the election.

00:52:04.120 He originally said he would go,

00:52:05.340 then he backtracked and said, I'm not going to go.

00:52:07.300 Then the regional powers sort of said,

00:52:09.140 you know, you will be going, thank you very much.

00:52:11.160 And I was there during all of this,

00:52:12.640 and they were pressuring him.

00:52:13.540 They were even kind of threatening, perhaps, to invade.

00:52:16.480 And then he went.

00:52:18.020 And there was a new guy, Dama Barrow,

00:52:20.380 who actually had worked in Britain.

00:52:22.580 I think he'd been at one point a security guard at Argos,

00:52:26.640 but he'd also been a property developer.

00:52:29.060 Wherever you are in life, you can always, always make it, guys.

00:52:33.040 You can dream big, dream big.

00:52:34.840 Dream big.

00:52:35.840 But you know what?

00:52:36.740 And there he is, president.

00:52:38.220 So you asked me, so one thing I would say is that democracy

00:52:42.260 is kind of in a weird sort of way alive and kicking in parts of Africa

00:52:47.360 in a way that it's not in parts of the West.

00:52:49.800 So it's fascinating to me as a Russian, because in Russia, we still haven't had this.

00:52:54.280 We've never had that transition of power without any interference.

00:52:58.540 Russia has never had that. And what you're saying is Africa increasingly is having that.

00:53:02.380 Yes. And it's patchy. It can go two steps back, you know, whatever, whatever the phrase is.

00:53:07.700 But but it but there is something definitely happening.

00:53:10.600 And it's interesting and moving and positive.

00:53:13.540 I think that's incredible. And that's really heartwarming.

00:53:15.680 I come from a Latin America background where my mother is, and politics there is just riddled with corruption.

00:53:22.160 And obviously the stereotype, and again, it's a stereotype of African politics, is a corruption.

00:53:28.000 Corruption has essentially pretty much destroyed Venezuela and its economy.

00:53:33.320 How much of a challenge does Africa face with its corruption in politics?

00:53:37.000 Yeah, huge.

00:53:38.700 Look, you know, democracy is kind of war by other means.

00:53:41.780 and the way that these countries have been kind of formed,

00:53:46.540 you know, people's loyalties might not be to the state of Kenya.

00:53:49.760 It might be to the Kikuyu.

00:53:51.700 And we kind of think the Kikuyu is a tribe,

00:53:53.380 but that's a really silly way of looking at it.

00:53:55.000 It's better to think of it as like the English or something.

00:53:57.940 You know, these are cultures with their own language,

00:54:01.980 you know, with their own belief system,

00:54:04.380 with their own kind of cultural traits

00:54:06.460 and sort of sense of identity and unity.

00:54:10.580 And so if you're in power, your loyalty may be more to, you know, the Kikuyu than to this kind of artificial nation called Kenya.

00:54:24.540 And that can breed corruption.

00:54:27.060 I mean, also, if you don't have, you know, institutions, I mean, we've seen in the West how fragile institutions can be.

00:54:32.820 You know, you get a president comes up, says, I don't believe in the FBI.

00:54:35.600 They make up stuff.

00:54:36.960 I don't believe in the fake New York Times, you know.

00:54:41.680 I don't believe in the court system.

00:54:44.760 You know, even when we've had sort of hundreds and hundreds of years of this,

00:54:49.160 our kind of belief system can be quite shaky.

00:54:52.400 If you've never really had that, and there was no real intention by the colonial powers,

00:54:56.080 certainly Britain, to build these things.

00:54:57.920 You know, they left the countries with, you know, handfuls of graduates.

00:55:01.580 you know they didn't really leave much behind in terms of you know functioning institutions

00:55:06.820 so to build those up from scratch and those are the things that are checks and balances

00:55:10.920 otherwise who comes to power will people come to power that want to enrich themselves and not

00:55:15.880 always I should say but you know but depressingly often so what you need is you need the growth of

00:55:21.740 civil society which I definitely am seeing and you know you need institutions to put their foot

00:55:26.820 down to draw lines which you do see sporadically so when I was in Kenya and there was an election

00:55:31.560 election and there was a claim um that the election hadn't been entirely fair the supreme

00:55:38.000 court annulled the election it was kind of a big shock and lo and behold people agreed and

00:55:44.220 peacefully went back to the polls they had another election it was actually kind of the same result

00:55:48.080 but but but but you know that is democracy at work isn't it that's democracy at work i mean you know

00:55:54.540 if that happened in america you'd say well it's amazing the functioning of democracy despite all

00:55:58.260 problems well this happened in kenya yeah um so you know absolutely you know if people come to

00:56:04.820 power and they steal lots of money and they enrich their own class and they send their money offshore

00:56:09.300 that is awful terrible you know you could say that's what's happened in in oil rich countries

00:56:14.800 like um nigeria and angola you know to a depressing degree and but that is certainly not the whole

00:56:20.940 story and the other thing we should remember of course is that it takes two to tango it takes two

00:56:25.120 to be corrupt and

00:56:26.420 on the other side of the table are often

00:56:28.600 our own western companies who want to extract

00:56:31.300 minerals or oil or whatever

00:56:33.280 and you know

00:56:34.900 if someone's taking a bribe

00:56:36.960 you can be sure that someone's paying a bribe too

00:56:38.740 makes sense

00:56:40.220 one of the other things probably final thing

00:56:42.940 that we'll talk about on Africa

00:56:44.520 you mentioned the population

00:56:47.060 growth there and one

00:56:49.100 of the things you talked about now is that

00:56:51.060 now about 1 billion of the world

00:56:53.200 7 billion people live in Africa

00:56:55.240 And within, I think, by the end of the century, you said it would be four out of 12 billion.

00:57:00.160 Four out of 11.

00:57:00.940 Four out of 11.

00:57:01.720 So we go from a seventh to more than a third.

00:57:05.860 That's right.

00:57:06.900 And tell us about that.

00:57:08.540 Okay.

00:57:08.900 So there's a guy called Hans Rosling who died.

00:57:11.500 That's the guy I was talking about.

00:57:12.800 I wondered, actually.

00:57:14.360 So Hans Rosling, who I think is a genius, I really love Hans Rosling.

00:57:17.860 He has this easy way of remembering the world's population,

00:57:21.080 which is he says the pin code of the world is 1114 and so that means there's 1 billion people

00:57:27.900 these are approximate numbers 1 billion people live in the americas 1 billion live in europe

00:57:31.580 1 billion live in africa and 4 billion live in asia we tend to think of the world's population

00:57:36.460 as exploding but this is not true because if you fast forward to 2050 the pin code of the world

00:57:42.020 becomes 1125 i.e 1 billion in america in the americas because the americas has basically

00:57:48.700 stopped growing. One billion in Europe, because Europe has basically stopped growing. Another

00:57:53.680 billion in Asia, another, what is that, 25%, because Asia is really slowing down. And then

00:58:01.920 it will sort of stop. But Africa keeps growing. So it goes to 2 billion. And then it may double

00:58:07.820 again, by the end of the century to 4 billion. So he said, I think jokingly that, you know,

00:58:12.900 His investment tip is real estate in Somalia because he says that the whole kind of focus of the global economy will tilt from the Pacific and the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean because then you will have 4 billion in Africa and 5 billion in Asia centered around the Indian Ocean.

00:58:38.720 And that will become a kind of the whole locus of world trade and business.

00:58:45.020 And, you know, this is futurology, so you can't take it too seriously.

00:58:48.920 And I certainly don't advise buying beachfront territory in Mogadishu right yet.

00:58:53.500 But you never know. And the locus of the world is shifting there.

00:58:58.900 And I think that's something that that is important in very interesting ways, possibly in frightening ways.

00:59:06.300 If, you know, if those people don't have jobs, if their economies aren't functioning, then that's going to lead to, you know, huge amounts of turmoil, which will not be confined to Africa.

00:59:18.020 And if they do have jobs and they are in functioning economies, then, you know, what we have tended to see as the kind of the problem continent could become a locus of sort of, you know, opportunity and, you know, growth.

00:59:35.000 there you go

00:59:36.220 finally a positive

00:59:37.100 note in this podcast

00:59:38.060 very good

00:59:39.120 so start saving up

00:59:40.100 for property in

00:59:40.840 Mogadishu

00:59:41.280 20 years from now

00:59:42.080 David Pilling

00:59:42.780 thank you very much

00:59:43.500 for coming on

00:59:44.040 you're on Twitter

00:59:45.080 at David Pilling

00:59:45.980 at David Pilling

00:59:46.740 and the book is called

00:59:48.120 The Growth Delusion

00:59:48.760 it is indeed

00:59:49.340 thank you so much

00:59:50.040 it's been fun

00:59:50.780 and just before we go

00:59:52.300 Konstantin

00:59:53.040 what's your Twitter handle

00:59:53.900 at Konstantin Kishin

00:59:54.860 I still have the Russian bots

00:59:56.020 following me

00:59:56.540 so join them

00:59:57.400 yep

00:59:58.060 mine's Francis Foster

00:59:59.480 I'm at Failing Human

01:00:00.540 give me a follow on that

01:00:01.860 and yeah

01:00:02.740 I really enjoyed it

01:00:03.940 thank you very much

01:00:04.780 for coming on

01:00:05.320 not at all

01:00:05.740 thank you

01:00:06.180 follow us

01:00:06.800 at TriggerPod

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01:00:08.640 subscribe to the YouTube channel

01:00:09.940 very important

01:00:10.440 and we'll see you in the next episode

01:00:11.520 thank you very much

01:00:12.180 and also before we go

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TRIGGERnometry - May 21, 2018

Triggernometry - Ep. 5 David Pilling

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